For years, I struggled with the presentation of the category of “Middle East” to my students at Howard University, a historically black college. Like many of their professors, my students did not consider North Africa to be part of Africa. The reason was simple: the study of the continent was bifurcated between two fields, African and Middle East studies. African studies focused on sub-Saharan Africa; North Africa was the purview of Middle East studies.

Although my graduate training in the United States was responsible for my reluctant acceptance of this implied bifurcation of Africa, teaching at a historically black college fueled my increased questioning of this intellectual division. As an Egyptian-born political scientist raised in the 1950s, I belong to a generation taught to believe the contention of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the first president of the new republic, that our national identity was the product of three concentric circles: one Arab, one Islamic, and one African.Footnote ¹ This triad was reinforced by the memory of frequent visits by African leaders, like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Modibu Keita of Mali, who joined Nasser in advocating African unity and the nonaligned movement.

The bifurcation of the continent separating north from south is clearly a recent construction, an example of invented or imaginative geography. The work of Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean world was very helpful in providing a historical basis for challenging the notion of the African Sahara as a natural geographic barrier separating the north from sub-Saharan Africa. His work, which emphasizes the longue durée, demonstrates how premodern long-distance trade routes enlivened the Sahara with caravan stops; merchants connected both parts of the continent and facilitated the exchange of African gold for European copper goods.Footnote ² Along with merchandise, Islam and the Arabic language traveled to various parts of the continent, laying the foundation for important cultural linkages. Racial differences did not constitute a persuasive basis for the separation of north and south. As a stopping point along long-distance trade routes, North Africa was racially mixed, leading Europeans to consider residents anything but “white.”

If the political economy of Africa did not justify the continent's bifurcation, what cultural and geographic referents led to the coining of the relatively recent category of “Middle East”? Whereas the older category of “Near East” offered a Eurocentric label for the part of Asia that was geographically closest to Europe, representing North Africa and southwestern and northwestern Asia as the “middle” of a hypothetical East made very little sense. Although one can see how the Asian continent extended east, North Africa was bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the western side—unless the African continent was considered part of the new “Orient” that orientalist scholarship identified with Europe's “other”! If Africa is part of the Orient, one must make the connection between power and knowledge that Michel Foucault first brought into focus and that Edward Said built upon as he critiqued orientalism's emphasis on the essential opposition of West versus East.

A prominent Africanist political scientist, Joel Samoff, offers an interesting historically specific reading of how the construction of a bifurcated Africa evolved from the political to the professional in the United States after World War II. Although the State Department maintained a combined Near East and Africa desk in the immediate aftermath of the war, decolonization spurred the agency to create a separate Africa desk in the 1950s—minus North Africa, which was deemed too important to be subsumed in the less strategic African region.Footnote ³

In the new world order with the United States as a superpower, the Near East label had to be replaced by a new designation that displaced the centrality of the former colonial powers. From a U.S. geographic standpoint, the artificial category of Middle East separated North Africa from Africa, emphasizing its middle location among the three major continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The creation of the African Studies Association in 1957 and the Middle East Studies Association in 1966 institutionalized the political bifurcation of the African continent into two academic fields that adhered to two distinct “imaginative geographies” and produced specialized knowledge that legitimated this blatant invention of location in accordance with power considerations.

In support of this view of the political history of these two area studies and the relatively recent history of Middle East as a category, let me point to the academic and government careers of Ralph Bunche and the intellectual work of Frantz Fanon. A leading African American political scientist who founded the Political Science Department at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1928, Bunche completed his doctoral dissertation on French West Africa at Harvard University in the early 1930s.Footnote ⁴ In 1941 he joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, adding North Africa to his regional research interests in preparation for the U.S. invasion of North Africa following the attack on Pearl Harbor. He produced a manual on the region, A Guide to North Africa, designed to educate U.S. soldiers about countries where they were be stationed.Footnote ⁵ In the 1940s an Africa specialist could easily be assigned to work on North Africa without violating any professional boundaries of the field. Bunche was also invited to lecture on North Africa by universities training researchers headed to the region, another indication of the lack of existing professional divisions. When Bunche finally left the OSS for the State Department, he was initially assigned to the Near Eastern and African Section of the Division of Territorial Studies before he joined the Division of International Security and Organization.Footnote ⁶

Bunche played an important role in the negotiations that led to the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, joining it as a member of the secretariat. In the first major conflict facing the newly created organization, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) drew on Bunche's knowledge of the region to mediate the differing views of two diplomatic working groups. UNSCOP eventually recommended partitioning the territory into a Jewish and an Arab state in 1947. Following the assassination of Count Folk Bernadotte, Bunche served as “acting mediator” in the war of 1948. For his creative negotiations of the difficult armistice agreements between the newly created state of Israel and its neighboring Arab states, he earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. Bunche's illustrious career underscored the permeable boundaries of knowledge produced about West and North Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. Bunche, an expert on colonial West Africa, was able to transfer his knowledge to the study of North Africa and Palestine, in northwestern Asia.

The intellectual work of Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial theorist from Martinique who actively supported the Algerian liberation struggle in the late 1950s and the 1960s, illustrates the converse: he used knowledge generated about North Africa to theorize about the dilemmas facing the rest of the continent in the postcolonial era. His important book, The Wretched of the Earth, offers lessons learned in the Algerian context for understanding the national struggles taking place on the rest of the continent. In the chapter “Concerning Violence,” he theorizes that the colonized need to use violence against the colonizers to regain their agency, that is to say, their capacity for action and self-determination. In another chapter, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” he suggests that the African middle class is not capable or fit to lead the struggle for national development because of its intermediary role as a business agent of the metropolitan bourgeoisie. Here is another significant example of the permeable intellectual boundaries that make it possible to see the common dilemmas and concerns that emerged in a North African context as integral to understanding the developmental concerns of the rest of the continent.

Why go through all this intellectual trouble to put back North Africa where it obviously belongs? As we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Edward Said's Orientalism, which deals with “representation” as a form of power that is seldom examined or questioned, it is important to examine another example of how power and knowledge interacted to transform part of the African continent into the Orient-cum-Middle East, defying long-standing geographic boundaries and histories. Africa as another representative of the Orient makes explicit the intellectual implications of the bifurcation, or perhaps balkanization, of the continent: it has reinforced Africa's subordinate status as an other. Conversely, it is useful for us students of this artificially created Middle East to examine the consequences of that separation from sub-Saharan Africa on our understanding of the region's history and politics. Of most importance, this attempt to reintegrate the two parts of the African continent will benefit future generations in Middle East and African studies. Their horizons and understanding of the region can expand in ways less encumbered by imperial considerations and concerns.